Nico Robin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Nico Robin, a fictional character in the One Piece franchise created by Eiichiro Oda, is known to the world's authorities as the "Devil Child". The name sounds like a warning about a monster. The woman behind it is an archaeologist and historian who spends much of her time with books. She is also a Devil Fruit user, someone who ate a fruit that gave her an unnatural power. She first appears as an antagonist, yet she eventually becomes a member of the Straw Hat Pirates. What could a scholar from a library island have done to earn such a name? Why would a survivor of unimaginable loss ask to be left behind in a collapsing tomb? And who was the person who refused to let her die? The answers begin with a language that almost nobody alive can read.

  495258

• 2. The Forbidden Language

  ›

  Poneglyphs are large, apparently indestructible stone steles inscribed in an ancient script that most people in the One Piece world cannot decipher. They carry knowledge of the world's past that no other source preserves. Robin is the only known living person who can read them. The World Government forbids the practice and considers her ability a threat.

  One stretch of history matters above all others. The Void Century lies 800 years before the main events, and the World Government took shape after it. Every Government-approved source has erased that era.

  Robin's lifelong dream is to read the Rio Poneglyph, a legendary stele holding the True History of her world, Void Century included. Succeeding would complete the research of her mother, Nico Olvia, and of her late mentor, Professor Clover. To get there she must first locate all thirty Poneglyphs scattered across the world. Four of them, the Road Poneglyphs, each give a piece of information. Joined together, those pieces point to Laugh Tale, the last island on the Grand Line. Gol D. Roger is rumoured to have buried his legendary treasure there, the "One Piece" itself.

  By the story's present she has read at least nine of the stones. She also knows where another stands, in a secret chamber of Kouzuki Sukiyaki's castle in Wano Country, though she has not yet read it.

  3942434570

• 3. Ohara

  ›

  Ohara, an island in the West Blue, was home to the world's oldest and largest library. Robin was born there on the 6th of February, twenty-eight years before the main events. Her mother was the archaeologist Nico Olvia. Her father has never been named. Robin shares her birthday with her mother, and at the age of eight she became an archaeologist too.

  Olvia left when Robin was two, joining a research expedition. She came back alone six years later. In the meantime Robin was raised by Olvia's brother Oran and his wife Roji. At some point in her childhood she ate a Devil Fruit. Behind her teachers' backs, she also learned from them how to translate the outlawed Poneglyphs.

  When she was eight, a castaway giant washed up on Ohara's coast. He was Jaguar D. Saul, and he told her he was a Vice Admiral. The World Government, he said, had discovered the island's research and sent a battlefleet to wipe out the scholars and the library. Olvia returned the same day with the same warning. Then the fleet arrived and opened fire, even on the ship carrying evacuating civilians. That order came from then-Vice Admiral Sakazuki. Vice Admiral Kuzan froze Saul to apparent death.

  Honouring Saul's last wish, Kuzan helped Robin escape, and she became Ohara's sole survivor. She lived on the run for twenty years. The Government named her the "Demon of Ohara" and set a bounty of 79,000,000 on her. Officially she was wanted for trying to overthrow the Government, and the real reasons stayed classified.

  At eight she joined her first pirate crew. Her reputation as a traitor, an assassin and a lone rider meant that neither civilians nor pirates would ever trust her.

  3940665618

• 4. Baroque Works

  ›

  At the age of 23, fifteen years after Ohara, Robin finally entered the Grand Line from her home sea, the West Blue. A year later she arrived in the Arabasta Kingdom and joined Sir Crocodile's crime syndicate, Baroque Works. Her codename there was Ms. All-Sunday.

  She served as vice-president, answering only to Crocodile. She was the only agent who knew his true identity, since everyone else knew him as Mr. 0. Her daily work was supervising and coordinating, linking Mr. 0 to his subordinates. Crocodile had used his position as a Warlord of the Sea to track her down. He wanted her unique talent for reading Poneglyphs.

  Their shared project was called Operation Utopia. It aimed to find and decipher a Poneglyph hidden beneath Arabasta's capital, Alubarna. Crocodile believed it held crucial information on an ancient superweapon named Pluton.

  Robin first met her future crewmates by sneaking onto their ship. She offered them a rare Eternal Pose that would lead to a secure island, far from Arabasta. Luffy destroyed it, telling her she had no authority over where the ship went. Princess Vivi soon exposed her as Baroque Works' vice-president.

  Crocodile eventually found the Poneglyph in the dungeons of the Tomb of the Kings. Robin read it and told him it contained only the kingdom's annals, not the weapon's secrets. Then she attacked him. She was easily beaten and left half-dead. Luffy went on to defeat Crocodile.

  Afterward Robin handed Luffy the antidote for the poison in Crocodile's hook. Then she asked him to leave her in the collapsing tomb, because she wanted to die. Luffy ignored her protests and carried her out anyway.

  6164656768

• 5. Finding a Crew

  ›

  Robin sneaked aboard the Straw Hats' ship a second time, now to ask for a place on the crew. She argued that Luffy had insulted her by denying her wish to die. In her view, that made him responsible for her continuing to live. For the first time she spoke aloud her quest for the Rio Poneglyph. Everyone protested except Sanji, but Luffy accepted her as the seventh member. She was the oldest on board. Her bounty was the second highest in the crew, behind Luffy's 100,000,000 and above Zoro's 60,000,000.

  Aboard the Going Merry she mostly read history books, while Sanji doted on her. Zoro stayed the one crewmate still wary of her. In Skypiea's ancient capital, Shandora, she studied a Poneglyph about another superweapon, Poseidon. It also carried a message from Gol D. Roger, written in the ancient script to discourage scholars from digging further.

  At Long Ring Long Land, the crew met Kuzan again, now an Admiral with the codename Aokiji. He had come to see for himself whom she was travelling with. He judged the crew too dangerous with her aboard and attacked. He beat Luffy, Zoro and Sanji together, and froze Robin. Luffy then fought him alone to buy time and ended up frozen as well. Aokiji let them all go, convinced that Robin would one day betray and destroy them.

  In Water 7, a city renowned for its shipwrights, a masked man mumbled "CP9" to her, and she froze in shock. CP9 threatened an island-destroying Buster Call unless she helped them. They wanted her to assist in assassinating the mayor, Iceburg, and in stealing Pluton's blueprints. They believed Iceburg had inherited those plans from his late master, the shipwright Tom. She was also to take the blame and follow them to the military base Enies Lobby to be executed. She told her crew about "the darkness in her heart" and said she must leave.

  That night CP9 and Robin attacked the company Galley-La and tried to kill Iceburg. The assassins revealed themselves as a secret government agency. They found the blueprints in the hideout of Franky, an underworld boss who had been Tom's apprentice, and stole them.

  Once the Straw Hats understood that her real aim was their safety, they sailed to Enies Lobby. There they declared open war on the World Government to win her back. Robin realized she had found people who would never sell her out, and she voiced her will to live. After defeating CP9, they fled to Water 7. Their battered ship could not sail again, so Franky built them a new one.

  Aokiji asked whether she had at last found a place to stay. She answered "Yes". He walked away, remarking that Ohara had not been fully destroyed. Her bounty rose slightly to 80,000,000, which she suspected was Aokiji's doing. She also helped persuade Franky to join. And she learned that Luffy is the grandson of Vice-Admiral Monkey D. Garp and the son of Dragon, the world's most wanted criminal, who leads a revolutionary army.

  7072737577

• 6. Two Lost Years

  ›

  At the Sabaody Archipelago, Robin met Silvers Rayleigh, once Gol D. Roger's first mate. He confirmed that the Roger pirates left the message on the Shandora stone. He also said they had found the Rio Poneglyph and read the True History. Robin declined his offer to tell her what it said. Rayleigh warned that they were only pirates and lacked a scholar's training. Robin would probably reach different conclusions than theirs, he added, which left her puzzled.

  Soon after, Admiral Borsalino, codenamed Kizaru, raided the archipelago. He had been sent to eliminate the pirates after Luffy punched a World Noble in the face at a slave auction. Then Bartholomew Kuma scattered the crew to separate places around the world.

  Robin landed in Tequila Wolf, a country in the East Blue. Its people had been enslaved 700 years earlier and forced to build a seemingly endless bridge. She was captured and put to work, with no explanation for why the bridge existed. She escaped by stealing the keys to her handcuffs, just before the Revolutionary Army liberated the country.

  From a newspaper she learned of the Marineford War, and that the World Nobles had ordered the bridge built. She also received Luffy's message to train for two years and meet again at Sabaody. The Revolutionaries told her they had searched for her for ten years because of her knowledge of Poneglyphs, and that Dragon wanted her to join. She turned down their offer of protection but agreed to meet him. She refused to enter the ship's cabins because they had no escape routes, and rode the whole way on deck. For the first time, she said, she wanted to grow stronger for someone else.

  She trained with the Revolutionaries for two years. She learned to master her Devil Fruit powers and the basics of Fish-Man Karate, which she applied to her sprouted limbs. She earned a new epithet, "Light of the Revolution".

  Robin was the eighth Straw Hat to return to Sabaody, and she came back secretly to shake off Government agents. She reunited with Franky, Nami, Usopp and Chopper at Grove 17. Once the full crew gathered, they set sail for Fish-Man Island.

  Later, in Wano, the Government's CP0 tried and failed to capture her, and her bounty jumped from 130,000,000 to 930,000,000. The earlier figure had come from her part in defeating Donquixote Doflamingo. The new one also reflected the raid on Onigashima, the defeat of Kaido and the defeat of Black Maria. It counted her knowledge of Poneglyphs as well. It is the highest bounty in her crew below one billion.

  9198222138

• 7. Powers and Peculiarities

  ›

  Robin crosses her arms in an "X" across her chest when she uses her power, though she does not strictly need to. Her Flower-Flower Fruit is a Paramecia-type Devil Fruit. It lets her sprout duplicates of any body part from any surface within range, and the number appears to be unlimited. The copies can grow from her own body, from inanimate surfaces, from other people's bodies, and even on top of other copies. She fully controls them. Duplicate eyes and ears let her see and hear from a distance. She can produce complete clones of herself and gigantic limbs. After her two years of training she could also sprout wings made of arms and hands, which let her fly.

  Her temperament is just as unusual. Robin has a morbid streak that her crewmates Usopp, Chopper and Nami find unnerving. When Usopp playfully interviewed her on her arrival, she named "assassination" as her specialty. She later proposed "Little Darkness" as the name for the crew's new ship. She sometimes shows a fondness for horror fashion.

  That taste surfaced aboard the huge pirate ship Thriller Bark. She backed Luffy's idea of exploring it because she liked thrills, and she found the three-headed zombie dog Cerberus cute. Gecko Moria, a Warlord of the Sea, stole her shadow there.

  Oda has answered fan questions about her over the years. If she were real, he has said, she would be of Russian nationality and would "smell like flowers". She loves sandwiches and anything that goes with coffee, including cakes that are "not too sweet". She likes chewing gum least, because she "can't swallow it". She sleeps seven hours a night, from 11 pm to 6 am.

  Before the two-year gap she favored dark or purple outfits and a cowboy look, with cowboy hats in Arabasta, Jaya, Skypiea and Sabaody. As Ms. All-Sunday she wore a purple cowgirl corset and miniskirt, a white cowboy hat and high-heeled boots. Afterward she dropped her hime cut for curtain bangs and let her hair grow to the lower back.

  5051472383

• 8. Creation and Reception

  ›

  On the 22nd of November 1999, Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump published chapter 114 of One Piece, titled "The Course". It introduced Robin. Oda, a fan of director Quentin Tarantino, has said he drew on Mia Wallace for her design. Mia Wallace is the character Uma Thurman plays in Pulp Fiction (1994).

  Robin joined the story late. She and Franky are the only crew members missing from the original concept art for the Straw Hats. That art did include a male botanist, which may hint at her Flower-Flower power.

  In the Japanese anime, Yuriko Yamaguchi voices her, and Anzu Nagai voices her as a child. English dubs use Veronica Taylor and Stephanie Young, with Jad Saxton as the child. In the 4Kids Entertainment version her codename became Miss Sunday, and Taylor gave her a country accent. She is also a playable character in the crossover fighting games Jump Super Stars and Jump Ultimate Stars. Emiya Ichikawa II played her in a kabuki production at Tokyo's Shinbashi Enbujō throughout October and November 2015. In the live action adaptation, Russian actress Lera Abova plays her. That series gives her an early subplot in Shellstown and Loguetown, plus appearances during the Drum Island events.

  Fans have embraced her. Her looks sparked a cosplay trend in Japan, where women tried to copy her iconic outfits. In 2013 the site Tokyo Otaku Mode asked fans on Facebook which characters they would most want to date, and Robin came second. In 2014 a Goo Ranking poll of NTT customers placed her sixth among the top 15 black-haired female anime characters.

  Critics have been admiring. Rebecca Silverman of Anime News Network wrote that Robin "watches everything with quiet, amused detachment". Reviewing the 278th episode, Sam Leach of the same site called her "I want to live!" scene "one of the most cathartic moments you'll ever find in fiction". Sean Cubillas of Screen Rant noted that she has softened into something like a mother figure for the crew. Even so, her imagination still turns every threat into a darker scenario.

  7958257